


Intertemporal Utility Maximization; Or, How to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck

by lyrithim



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Academia, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Economics, M/M, No age difference, Professor Steve Rogers, please forgive the inaccuracies, this author has only tangential knowledge of both economics and the academia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8876797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: On his second semester at the University of Scildan, Professor Rogers was already known to the graduate students in Bucky’s cohort to be a confrontational asshole. So Bucky really wasn’t looking forward to TAing for some young, entitled punk in one of his last semesters in academia—in an lower division class, no less—until he met the punk himself.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I am so incredibly proud of the title, I can’t even. That’s 50% of the reason I’m still writing this thing. Shoutout to my fellow capitalist sellouts.
> 
> Also, I’m not actually in academia. For example, I think PhD students of Bucky’s seniority wouldn’t usually still be teaching, but his age mattered for reasons. Soo. There will be a ton of factual errors. In the econ stuff too.
> 
> Chapters are short. Updates should be more frequent.

“...and then, Hodge told me,” Jim was saying as Bucky entered the econ grad lounge, “Rogers made him run all the way across campus—”

“ _ No _ ,” said Jacques.

“ _ Yes _ . And when he got back with all the printouts, class was already over.”

“Savage,” Dum-Dum grunted out. “Just savage.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t trust Hodge,” Gabe said, “but apparently not even Sitwell had a good time with him—”

“Wonder how Buck will deal with him,” Montgomery mused.

“Bucky?” Jim asked. “Isn’t he TAing for Erskine again?”

Bucky coughed as he tossed his coat across the arms of a musty, bleached sofa. His five fellow PhD candidates turned to face him. He raised an eyebrow and smirked at them. “What, you guys can’t get enough of me that you have to gossip about me too?”

“Shut up, Barnes,” Dum-Dum drawled. “Is it true? You’re TAing for Rogers this semester?”

Bucky stayed silent for a bit, milking the moment. Then, tragically, he sighed. “Yeah.”

The five of them gasped and recoiled comically.

Bucky had a similar reaction when, over the summer, Dr. Erskine destroyed all of Bucky’s careful planning for his final year in the program to announce a six-month leave for Bhutan, where the man was offered an opportunity to more closely study the nation’s health care system. The usual class that Bucky would be assistant-teaching for had already been canceled, and other graduate students had already taken the other classes within Bucky’s field of expertise. The arrangement would, in other words, leave Bucky without a viable source of income to pay for the exorbitant tuition that the University of Scildan demanded of its graduate students each semester.

Dr. Erskine, seeing Bucky doing the mental cost-benefit analysis of taking out a loan to buy a used car or sleeping on the streets, quickly said, “Do not worry, James. I’ve already made suitable arrangements for your teaching assistantship. Dr. Rogers has been most gracious.”

When the initial crash of relief subsided, Bucky’s deadline-doused, sleep-deprived brain reviewed the oddity of having a second “newly hired assistant professor” in the department besides that apparent asshole of a new professor named Steve Rogers—and that was when he made the connection.

Bucky’s interaction with Rogers before this piece of news had been minimal: he had marked out Roger’s slim frame in faculty meetings, nodded at him politely across hallways, and weaved together a wild narrative with the rest of his cohort behind the man’s back. After his meeting with Erskine, Bucky emailed Rogers an appropriately long-winded introduction and thank-you for the position. He appended the main text with questions about course planning and grade policies so that he could at least appear to give a damn. In response was this letter:

**from:** STEVE G. ROGERS  < [ stevegrogers@scildan.edu ](mailto:stevegrogers@scildan.edu) >   
**to:** JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES  < [ jbbarnes@scildan.edu ](mailto:jbbarnes@scildan.edu) >   
**subject:** Re: TAing for econ 202

_ Dear James, _

_ It will be a pleasure to meet you as well. Attached is the syllabus for the class and the grading rubric from the economics department, both also posted online. I don’t expect that you need assistance understanding the material. _

_ Steve Rogers _ __  
_ Assistant Professor, Department of Economics _ _  
_ __ University of Scildan

That was the first, and last, direct communication Bucky had with Steve Rogers over the summer. Bucky was pulling out the email now, to recite its contents to his friends. They doubled-down on their condemnation of Steve Rogers’s assholery and heartily pitied Bucky.

 

—

 

**Rate My Professors  
** **Steve Rogers**

_ Overall Quality _ : 3.5  
_ Would Take Again _ : N/A  
_ Level of Difficulty _ : 4.1

**06/27/2016**        POOR   
Overall Quality: 2.0        Level of Difficulty: 4.0   
ECON202

_ For Credit _ : Yes   
_ Attendance _ : Mandatory   
_ Textbook Used _ : Yes   
_ Would Take Again _ : No   
_ Grade Received _ : N/A

TOUGH GRADER; PARTICIPATION MATTERS; SKIP CLASS? YOU WON’T PASS; TEST HEAVY; LECTURE HEAVY

this class was so unnecessarly difficult. te prof is new and seems to expect everyone to be super into macro like he is. doesn’t give out lecture notes outside class and tells you to borrow it from your classmates if you miss a class, and i ditn’t know this, so i had to take pictures of three weeks worht of notes. the worst part is that during lecture he just keeps on RAMBLING about stuff that we never cover on the midterms, like okay i guess i came here for nothing.

i took 201 last semester and got an A easy, but me and my friends only got thru this class because our ta - who, lets be real, also hated the professor - helped us out a T O N. inspired me to NEVER take a macro class in scildan.

1 people found this useful   
1 people did not find this useful

 

**05/20/2016**        POOR   
Overall Quality: 1.0        Level of Difficulty: 4.0   
ECON202

_ For Credit _ : N/A   
_ Attendance _ : N/A   
_ Textbook Used _ : N/A   
_ Would Take Again _ : N/A   
_ Grade Received _ : N/A

fucking libtard

0 people found this useful   
3 people did not find this useful

 

**05/10/2016**        AWESOME   
Overall Quality: 4.5        Level of Difficulty: 4.0   
ECON202

_ For Credit _ : Yes   
_ Attendance _ : Mandatory   
_ Textbook Used _ : Yes   
_ Would Take Again _ : N/A   
_ Grade Received _ : A-

TOUGH GRADER; ACCESSIBLE OUTSIDE OF CLASS

I don’t know why there are so many negative reviews here. I think this was Professor Rogers’s first year teaching, so he probably didn’t have that undergrad perspective and the stuff he teaches was probably too easy for him. He’s a little intimidating in class (he’s shorter than most of the students in class but sounds like a drill sergeant half the time), but he is a very nice man out of class. I went to his office hours and he helped me out with this problem that turned out to be totally easy and really my fault for not reading everything right. He’s actually kind of awkward one to one, but it’s also kind of adorable. Assignments are hard but hey the class is curved.

2 people found this useful  
1 people did not find this useful

 

[...]

 

—

 

Steve Rogers was—short. Bucky found himself stopped by this, somehow. He had expected men of great egos to have a matching physique, and he had inflated Steve Rogers in his mind to match those expectations. But the real Rogers, hunkered behind his desk, looked not able to reach even Bucky’s chin if he stood straight.

Steve Rogers was messy too. While other assistant professors kept their spaces sparse and clean, always painfully aware of the possibility of termination, the stack of folders by Steve Rogers’s tall lamp threatened to swoop over the man and bury him alive.

Bucky took all of this in, waiting too long to announce his presence so that Rogers eventually took note of him. Smoothing back his fluffed-up, frustrated hair, Rogers folded his glasses away and asked, “Hi, sorry, how may I help you?”

Bucky felt strangely stung. “I’m your teaching assistant, Professor. For your intermediate macroeconomics class.”

“Yes, James,” Rogers said, with a sharp nod. He came forward to shake Bucky’s hand, also a sharp tug. No, he was taller than Bucky thought. “Thank you for working with me at such a short notice.”

“Thank  _ you  _ for giving me this opportunity,” was Bucky’s automatic answer—automatic because he found, as Steve suddenly smiled, his own eyes to be skirting the contours of his jaws in the soft yellow light of this messy office.

“Please, have a seat,” said Steve Rogers, gesturing to the sad, half-beanbag-like pair of sofas that seem to melt into the sea of papers stacked around them. He was young, too. Bucky, who had done research in Romania for a couple of years before pursuing his doctorate, remembered looking over Steve Rogers’s CV online and doing the math from his graduation years—they were likely the same age. “Sorry for the mess. Usually, I’m—well. Dr. Erskine spoke highly of you. You’re main focus is developmental economics?”

“Yeah,” said Bucky, rubbing the back of his neck, “with some behavioral stuff thrown in.” He felt himself forcing out those words—strange, considering that it’s his research, and he would usually go at an opening like this at five thousand miles per hour. But the professor was just asking out of politeness. “It’s a slightly weird combination.”

“Your thesis—it’s on war trauma and its impact on developing economies, right?” Rogers asked. “Institutional memory. That’s not strange at all.”

“Oh,” Bucky said, laughing shortly, surprised. “Well, yeah, that’s just what I tell all the other graduate students too. I mean, rational expectations theory? Really? That’s all you’ve got? You can’t just hold onto that, especially not after the Recession.”

“Careful there, you’re talking to a macroeconomists here still,” Rogers said. It took a second for Bucky to realize that he was joking, but once he did, he was back at it, full-throttle.

“I know, touchy subject in the field,” Bucky said, grinning, “But you’ve got to break some models here and there to get actual results, you know? It can’t just be ‘diminished capital’ or whatever, you know? I mean, I’ve been to some of these places, before Scildan and on a couple of UN fellowships—it’s never as simple as some people out there make it as in their models. For example, once I—”

“Hey, Steve, I just remembered the name of the restaurant my niece found— Oh, hi,” said an immaculately dressed woman with bright red lipstick. Her bell-chimed British accent hinted Bucky who she was: Margaret Carter, an assistant professor from the political science department. She had just been hired a couple of years back too, but her groundbreaking research on demographics in the 2016 election—an achievement that penetrated into even the economics department—was already raising fears that she would soon be stolen by Georgetown or Harvard. She beamed at Bucky. “A friend of Steve’s?”

“No, just a graduate student,” Rogers said before Bucky could respond. He blinked, feeling inexplicably angry and annoyed with himself.

“Oh,” she said, her lips quirking up. “Grad school. Those were the days.”

“Isn’t it,” Rogers said.

She introduced herself as “Peggy” and shook his hand.

“James Barnes, developmental econ,” he said, putting on his charmer/networking smile again. “My advisor’s Dr. Erskine.”

“Dr. Erskine,” she said in acknowledgement. “I’ve had lunches with him a couple of times. He’s gone off to Bhutan this semester though, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Rogers said. “So James will be my TA for this semester.”

“Oh, I thought— I see,” Dr. Carter said. Then, collecting herself, she said, “Were you discussing something class-related? I can come back in half an hour, if you’d like.”

“No, no, I shouldn’t interrupt your meal,” Bucky said, grabbing his satchel. “Sorry about the tangent, Professor Rogers. Should I—come back at a later time or is emailing fine? I just wanted to introduce myself, today.”

“Um, I— Emailing is fine, if that’s what you like best. You sure you wouldn’t want to join us, though?” Rogers asked, rising from his seat.

Joining them hadn’t even crossed Bucky’s mind, especially since— He looked between the two of them. Yeah, they looked good together. “No, it’s fine, Professor. I usually eat with other grad students of my cohort on Wednesdays—I’ll see you at your lecture next week.”

He waved, then scurried out of the way.


End file.
